Bag For Life | Careless Ep 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

Tortoise Investigates, thank you for subscribing to Tortoise Investigates brought to you by The Observer.

Nkechi Simms (0:17)

Welcome to Camden.

Everything sort of happened in Camden. Camden is the heart of my story, I'd say.

Ashley John-Baptiste (0:33)

Nkechi Simms is walking the street where she grew up, a stone's throw from the borough's famous market. It's full of tourists and buskers, and for Nkechi, memories.

Nkechi Simms (0:44)

This is the door. Pretty magical. It didn't look like this when I lived here. The door would be blended in to like a big mural, and there'd be people sat here eating Chinese.

But yeah, I have lots of happy memories living in this flat. My best friend at the time lived downstairs, so we had lots of fun. I feel like as teenagers, you've got your best friend living downstairs, you're living in the centre of Camden, so we got up to a lot of trouble. Well, everything is so different now, but I still love it. It's still my Camden.

Ashley John-Baptiste (1:16)

And there's the buildings in the graffiti of the borough have changed. So too has Nkechi.

Nkechi Simms (1:22)

When I was 18, I used to work at that pub behind me.

For £6.20 an hour. I didn't have any GCSEs. And I actually cried outside my job interview at the time to my boyfriend. I was like, I'm not going to know what to do. I can't do it. And he was like, they're going to train you. It's going to be fine. But I had such little self-confidence that I just thought it was going to be terrible. And I mean, it was terrible, but I did it and I survived it.

Ashley John-Baptiste (1:46)

Nkechi has come a very long way from the teenager crying outside a pub before her first shift. In fact, she's a bit of a big deal now.

Nkechi Simms (1:56)

I wanted to be an actor from when I was a kid.

I was very playful and silly and creative. And I think also my mum really enjoyed watching TV. And so when I think back to my childhood, some of the best memories of my mum would be when we would be curled up on the sofa, under a blanket, watching Charmed and EastEnders.

Ashley John-Baptiste (2:19)

She didn't just like the idea of acting. She was actually good at it. At 11, her nan managed to get together the money to send her to a drama school on the weekends.

Nkechi Simms (2:31)

Everyone else would be dropped off by their mums in their Range Rovers. And I'd just be there having got like a train and a bus all by myself at 11 and like showed up and done my best. But then as I got older, life got harder.

My reality became a lot more difficult and suddenly acting felt very silly. Don't have time for that. I've got real world problems. And so, yeah, by 12, 13, I was sort of involved in other things that meant acting felt ridiculous.

Ashley John-Baptiste (3:08)

Her ambition to act gave way to some really turbulent years. But then when she turned 19, someone recommended a youth theatre group to her.

Nkechi Simms (3:18)

I got kicked off the first project for Fighting.

But they welcomed me back and they kept working on me. And I just needed to channel all those emotions. By this point, I was 19 years old. And I, yeah, was really blessed to have sort of had their intervention because a year and a half later, I was cast in Tortoise. So it all worked out for the better, really.

Ashley John-Baptiste (3:54)

That's right. You might recognize Nkechi from her part as Kizaya in Top Boy, one of the UK's most popular TV dramas.

And not just that. She's been in the BBC comedy Prue, Death in Paradise, and in an amazing full circle moment, an episode of the one and only EastEnders.

Nkechi Simms (4:15)

Are you all right, darling?

Ashley John-Baptiste (4:16)

It's Holly, right?

SPEAKER_4 (4:17)

We're all ready for you.

Nkechi Simms (4:18)

Let's just park around there. Nice one. Thank you. I'm looking forward to Reverend Francesco's engine on over town again.

And that for me felt monumental, even though it was maybe one of the smallest things I've done, if we're going by the size of the role. But there was definitely a moment where I got a bit teary-eyed and had to act really cool because that childhood version of me would have just simply not believed, not believed at all. It was all I used to talk about being a kid. I was like, I'm going to be an EastEnders. I'm going to be an EastEnders.